1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method and a computer program and, more specifically, to an information processing apparatus, an information processing method and a computer program for producing a menu for content recorded on an information recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the recording capacity of disk-type recording media increases, video cameras storing moving images or still images on a disk instead of the known recording tape are commercially available. Since the disk-type recording medium is used in a random-access fashion, any desired scene can be efficiently found from recorded data. Since the disk-type recording medium operates in a non-contact fashion, data accessing to the disk is performed in a manner free from physical wear. For example, digital versatile disk (DVD) video cameras are in widespread use because of the user friendliness thereof such as high image quality and ease of editing.
One of processes of the information processing apparatus is to produce a menu for content recorded on the information recording medium. The menu lists a title and a representative image corresponding to the content recorded on the information recording medium to allow a user to select the content on a screen of a display.
The content is delimited by a predetermined reproducing unit and the title and the representative image for each reproducing unit are listed in the menu. A standard reproducing unit depends on a recording format of the content and is typically based on a play list set corresponding to the audio-visual stream.
The menu is thus arranged with one play list handled as one reproducing unit. When a reproducing process starts with the representative image and the title listed in the menu selected, content reproducing is performed based on a single play list. This arrangement is inconvenient for the content to be reproduced with a unit finer than the reproducing unit.